The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  The annual cost of maintaining the interstellar program at its current level would feed every man, woman, and child in India and Pakistan. Currently, there are eighteen thousand researchers in extrasolar stations.Many of these stations have been in place for thirty years, since the dawn of the Interstellar Age. And we have reams of esoteric material describing climatic conditions and tectonics on other worlds. The Globe has no quarrel with this acquisition of scientific knowledge. But it is time, and more than time, to strike a balance.

  We are in deep trouble. We cannot feed, or house, or care for, a substantial portion of the global population. Those who smirk at the Noks and their World War I-style conflict might note that the daily toll from famine and malnutrition in China is higher than the total dead in the Nok War last year.

  Meantime, PSA lobbies for more funds to build more ships. It is time to call a halt.

  —Editorial, The Boston Globe

  May 22, 2202

  5.

  Quraqua’s Moon. Sunday, June 6; 0734 hours.

  Quraqua had a single satellite, roughly half the size of the Moon, ash-gray, scarred, airless. Tonight it was a bright yellow crescent, friendly, luminous. Inviting. But it was a moon with a difference. Six years ago, the pilot of an incoming packet had noticed what he thought was a city high in its northern quarter.

  “Richard?”

  He was absorbed in a hand-drawn chart spread out on his knees and across a sizable portion of the instrument panel. He waggled his hand to indicate he’d heard. “Let Henry know we’re here,” he said. “And make for Oz.”

  Beneath the red sun Bellatrix, and cloud-shrouded Quraqua, Winckelmann’s shuttle Alpha (there was no Beta) glided over the moonscape. Peaks and gorges and craters merged with glare and shadow. The shuttle crossed a low mountain range and hurtled out over a sea of flat polished rock. Richard sat quietly, as he always did at such times, leaning forward against his restraints, gazing placidly out the window. Hutch was uncomfortable with his insistence on coming here first. She would have preferred to complete preparations for the evacuation before they undertook any side adventures. There would be cargo to load, and last-minute problems, and she wanted all that worked out well in advance. Instead, she could imagine Richard getting caught up in the anomaly, and adding complications.

  His attitude did nothing to dispel those fears. “Plenty of time,” he said. “We have until the eleventh.” Five days.

  A ridge appeared, swept toward them, and vanished. The mare was heavily pocked. The Guide Book, which she had posted on her overhead display, indicated it was the oldest surface area on the moon. “Some of these craters,” she said, “are two billion years old.”

  Richard nodded, not listening. He wasn’t interested in geology.

  A sensor lamp blinked on.

  “Ship on the scope. Henry’s shuttle.”

  “Good.” His expression warmed.

  “It’s about twenty minutes behind us.” Hutch switched to manual, noted her position on the navigational displays, and throttled back.

  “Be good to see him again.” His eyes brightened. “This has to be a hard time for him. We thought we had forever to excavate Quraqua. Nobody believed we’d be ordered off. It turns out we were too cautious. Should have plowed right in. Like Schliemann.”

  Hutch had met Henry twice. He was an odd, rumpled little man who had given a lecture she’d attended when she was trying to learn enough archeology to persuade the Academy that she could be an asset. Two years later, when they’d shared passage on the Moon relay, he’d surprised her by remembering who she was. He even knew her name. Priscilla.

  The ground began to break up into canyons. A range of needle peaks swept past.

  “What were they like?” she asked. “The Quraquat?”

  “They lived a long time. Individually, I mean.” He fumbled in his jacket. “I should have a sketch here somewhere—must have left it in my room. Or”—sheepishly—“at home.” He kept searching pockets. “They looked like furry gators. But they were warm-blooded—”

  “No: I mean what were they like? What did they do? I know they had two sexes, and they had long life spans. What else?”

  “They had a lot of dark ages. Not as barbarous as Earth’s, not as military. But stagnant. Sometimes nothing would happen for a thousand years. No political development. No science. Nothing. They also had a talent for losing things. For example, we know of three different occasions on which they discovered Quraqua was not the center of the universe.”

  “Why? Why all the dark ages?”

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll go through them too. We just haven’t been around very long. In the case of the Quraquat, they might have been victims of their life spans. The wrong people succeed to power and don’t die. Not for a long time.” He tried unsuccessfully to brush his hair out of his eyes. “Think about that. Imagine having to deal with Hart for the next sixty years.” (Adrian Hart was the current chairman of the Academy Board of Trustees. He was fussy and vindictive, a micro manager with no ideas.)

  An amber lamp started to blink. “Coming up,” she said.

  Sunlight danced off the rocks ahead. The reflection splintered, and raced in both directions across the plain. They might have been looking at an illuminated highway, bright, incandescent.

  Richard leaned forward expectantly.

  The light grew solid. It became a wall. Bone-white against the gray moonscape, it extended from a low range of hills on the south to the horizon on the north. Hutch throttled back, fired a series of quick bursts from the maneuvering rockets. She took them down near the surface.

  The wall grew, and began to crowd the sky. It was enormous. The scale of the thing, as they drew closer, reminded her of the old textbook representations of Troy. She powered up the scopes, put the picture on the monitors: the thing appeared to be seamless.

  Except that there were holes punched in it. Long sections had fallen away, and there were places where the wall appeared to have been hammered into the ground. Rubble lay along its base.

  “Look,” Richard said. The structure was seared, scorched.

  “It does look as if somebody tried to knock the thing down.”

  “One would almost think so.”

  “What kind of fire would burn out here?”

  “Don’t know.” He folded his arms and canted his head. “I was wrong to neglect this place all these years. This is a fascinating site.”

  “So what happened here?”

  “I have no idea.” He sat looking for several minutes. “Frost,” he said.

  “Say again?”

  “I keep thinking of Robert Frost. ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall—’” He sank back, placed his fingertips together, and let the moment wash over him. “Magnificent,” he breathed. “An utterly sublime mystery. It is really no more than a rock sculpture in an airless place. Why was it built? And who would assault it?”

  It towered over them.

  The only reasonable explanation was that it had been hit by a swarm of meteors. There was indeed meteoric rock in the area. And a lot of craters. But there seemed something purposive in the assault.

  “It’s probably an illusion,” said Richard, who seemed always able to read her thoughts. “It’s the only artificial structure out here, so there’s nothing to contrast it with except the random chaos of the moonscape. Still—” He shook his head. “It’s hard to know how to read this.”

  It had been built, Hutch knew, between eleven and twelve thousand years ago. “Its age matches the Tull set.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There may be a connection.”

  It was eerie, and she found herself scouring the plain for oversized footprints.

  The wall was 41.63 meters high, and 8.32 kilometers on a side. It enclosed a perfect square. “The length of a side,” she read off the display on the monitor, “is precisely two thousand times the height.”

  “Base ten,” said Richard.

  “How many fingers did the Quraquat have?
”

  “They weren’t exactly fingers. But four.”

  “The Monument-Makers had five.”

  The shuttle nosed up to the wall. It hovered a few meters away. “Do we want to land?”

  “No. Not out here.”

  The wall had been old before there were pyramids in Egypt. Hutch floated before it, and felt the transience of her own mayfly existence as she never had on Iapetus, or at the other ancient sites. She wondered what the difference was. Maybe it is bracing, encouraging to know that beauty somehow survives. But to be outlived by such primal madness—

  “This thing,” said Richard, “is so different from everything else they left. If it is indeed theirs. The Monuments are light, exquisite, elegant. The race that created them enjoyed being alive. This thing: it’s grim. Irrational. Ugly. A fearful creation.” He pushed back in his chair the way people do during a simmy when the werewolf is approaching. “Take us up,” he said.

  She complied, moving at a leisurely pace.

  Richard unrolled his chart again. “What’ve we got on the building materials? Where did the stone come from?”

  She dug out the engineers’ report. “All local. Quarries were found in several places, but nowhere closer than six kilometers.”

  “They didn’t want to spoil the appearance by chewing up the landscape. That’s consistent, at least, with what we’ve seen elsewhere.”

  “I guess. Anyway, they must have modified the rock. One theory is that they reworked it using nanotech. There’s a lot of feldspar and quartz lying around. Apparently waste material. The wall itself is a kind of enhanced calcite.”

  “Marble.”

  “Yes. But better. More durable. More reflective.”

  “They wanted it to be seen from Quraqua.”

  “Apparently.” They were near the top now.

  They closed in on a section that had been burned. “Henry thinks,” Richard said, “that the damage dates to around 9000 B.C.”

  “That’s when it was built,” she said.

  “Somebody got right after it, didn’t they?”

  “Maybe the builders had a falling out. Quarreled over their little amusement park.”

  Richard held out his hands in supplication. “As good a guess as any.”

  She went back to her screen. “There’s a fair amount of trioxymethylene in the soil. Formaldehyde. But only around here. Near Oz.”

  “That doesn’t mean a damned thing to me. My chemistry’s godawful. What are the implications?”

  “This thing”—she jabbed a finger at the screen—“offers no theories.”

  The pseudo-city appeared beyond the wall: a dark cross-hatch of wide boulevards and blunt, broad buildings and long malls. A city of the void, a specter, a thing of rock and shadow. Hutch’s instincts demanded lights and movement.

  “Incredible.” Richard barely breathed the word.

  It was immense. She took them higher, and simultaneously switched the cabin heater to manual, moving the setting up a notch. The city, like the wall, lay in ruins.

  “Look at the streets,” he whispered.

  They were designed in exact squares. Kilometer after kilometer. All the way out and around the curve of the horizon. Oz was a place of numbing mathematical exactitude, overwhelming even in its state of general destruction. Avenues and cross streets intersected at precise 90-degree angles. She saw no forks, no gently curving roads, no merge lanes. City blocks had been laid out to the same rigorous geometry.

  “Not much imagination here,” she said.

  Richard’s breathing was audible. “If there is anything more at war with the spirit of the Great Monuments than this place, I can’t imagine what it would be.” No burst of inventiveness appeared anywhere. No hint of spontaneity. They called it Oz. But that was a misnomer. If Oz, the original Oz, was a land of wonder and magic, this place was pure stone. Right to the soul.

  Hutch disconnected from the vision, and withdrew into the cockpit. The gauges and keyboards and status lamps were all familiar and warm. The aroma of coffee floated in the still air.

  Oz had never been intended to shelter anyone. The structures that from a distance resembled houses and public buildings and towers, were solid rock, without even the suggestion of door or window. No bubble, of either plastene or energy, had ever protected the artifact. Henry’s teams had found no machinery, no devices or equipment of any kind.

  They drifted down the long avenues. Across the tops of marble block-buildings. Many of the blocks were perfect cubes. Others were oblongs. All were cut from flat polished rock, unmarked by any ripple or projection. They came in a multiplicity of sizes.

  Hutch looked out over the network of streets. In its original form, before whatever destruction had come on it, the stones had stood straight. No arc curved through the parallels and perpendiculars. No avenue sliced abruptly right or left. No rooftop sloped. No decorative molding or door knob existed anywhere.

  They floated down the streets at ground level. The blocks rose above them, ominous and brooding. They passed through an intersection. For the first time, Hutch understood the meaning of the term alien.

  “The dimensions of the blocks are multiples of each other,” she said. She brought up the numbers. Every block in the construct was divisible into cubes that measured 4.34 meters on a side. Thus, the various calcite forms that lined the squares and avenues could be perceived as so many units high by so many wide. Streets and open areas were divisible in the same way and by the same dimensions.

  The commlink chimed. “Dr. Wald, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Frank. Hello, Henry.”

  Hutch activated the video. Only one man appeared, and it was not Henry Jacobi. Frank Carson was about fifty, a trifle beefy, with an open, congenial countenance. He leveled a steady blue gaze at them, appraised Hutch without reaction, and spoke to Richard. “Henry’s not here, sir. Things have got a little hectic, and we couldn’t spare him.”

  Richard nodded. “Anything new on the Monument-Makers? New images?”

  “Negative.”

  Richard seemed almost entranced. “Anybody have any ideas what all this means?”

  “No, sir. We were hoping you could tell us.”

  Richard brought up the scheduling for Project Hope on his monitor. They were to blow the icecaps sometime Friday. “I don’t suppose Kosmik has changed anything?”

  “The deadline? No.” Carson’s expression showed disgust. “They’re on the circuit every day with a fresh warning and countdown status.”

  Hutch glanced reflexively at the ship’s clocks. Not a lot of time.

  “Henry asked me to express his regrets. He would have liked to meet you here, but we just have too much happening.” He spoke with military crispness. “What would you like to see?”

  “How about the center of this place, for a start? And I’m open to suggestion.”

  “Okay. I assume your pilot has me on her scope?”

  Hutch nodded.

  “Why don’t you follow me?”

  She acknowledged, signed off, and fell in behind. “Tell me about Carson,” she said.

  “You’ll like him. He’s retired army. One of those gifted amateurs who are a tradition in archaeology. Like yourself.” His tone was light, but she understood he was quite serious. “He’s Henry’s administrator and executive officer.” He looked squarely at her. “And his pilot. If Frank weren’t around, Henry would have to behave like a manager. As it is, Frank does all the routine stuff, and Henry gets to be an archeologist.”

  “Carson doesn’t object to that?”

  “Frank likes the arrangement. He’s a little rough around the edges, and he has a tendency to overreact. But he’s easygoing, and he can get things done without ruffling egos. He enjoys the work. The organization could do a lot worse.”

  Carson’s vehicle was starting to descend. “Downtown Oz,” said Hutch. The blocks were a little higher here than they were out near the wall. Other than that, the sameness was deadening.

 
There was a central square, anchored on each corner by a squat tower, or by the ruins of one. The square was about a half-kilometer on a side. A fifth tower, a unit shorter than the others, had been raised in the exact center. Each was as quadrilateral as everything else in Oz.

  Richard was half out of his seat, trying to get a better look. “Tilt this thing a little, will you? My way—”

  Hutch complied.

  Two towers were piles of rubble. A third, on the southwest, was scorched. Burned black from the base up. The fourth was almost untouched. “There,” Richard said, pointing to the black one. “Tell him to land there.”

  She relayed the message, and Carson acknowledged. “What are we looking for?” she asked.

  He looked pleased. “How much do you know about the symmetry of this place, Hutch?”

  “Not much. Just that it’s there. What’s to know?”

  “Put a few square kilometers on the screen.”

  “Sure.” She brought up a view centered on the middle tower.

  “Now. Pick a target. Anywhere.”

  “Okay.” She zeroed in on a cluster of oblongs forming a letter H. They were approximately two kilometers north.

  “Draw a line from the group directly through the central tower. And keep going.”

  On the opposite side of the screen, the line touched another H. At the same range. “It’s a reverse image,” she said.

  “Surprised?” Richard couldn’t suppress a smirk.

  Yes. The records she’d examined hadn’t mentioned it. “Maybe it all has religious significance. Some high-tech species doing penance. That make sense?”

  “Not to me.”

  Carson’s shuttle was almost down.

  Hutch turned the short-range scanners on the complex. “The central tower is nine units high, defining a unit as our basic block, four point three four meters on a side. The outer towers are ten. Like everything else here, they’re solid. There’s no evidence of any interior space.” Carson landed, and she started her own descent. “Funny: you’d expect the central tower to be the tallest of the group. Not the shortest. They just don’t think the way we do.”